Ten Tomorrows

by Roger Elwood

  Anyway, it was close to Matthew’s birthday, and I was getting ready for the Enomoto birth and waiting for Laura to start trouble. I went home from the Americana, having decided we could broadcast the birth from outside among all those garish plants if the weather were nice, or from the lobby if it weren’t, and I had also decided that we and the Enomotos could move there for the whole affair and put up any sightseers that might come by for the birth. I went home and Laura was on her ham radio, practicing her Chinese with Mei-ling, Our vidphone connections with Canton had been pretty poor. I tiptoed in, hoping she wouldn’t notice me right away, and went over to the bar to dial myself a scotch and soda. I needed the fortification. I was dialing the third one when she signed off.

  “It’s getting close to Matthew’s birthday,” I blurted out.

  She ignored that. “You know, your Chinese is getting rusty,” she said. “You ought to practice it more.”

  I couldn’t figure out what the hell that remark had to do with anything. We had already agreed that I would do a bilingual broadcast in English and Russian, and Laura would handle the Chinese. But I didn’t want to aggravate her, so I just said “Yeah” and dialed her a daiquiri.

  “Mei-ling wants to practice her English next time, but you might think about at least sitting in when we’re doing Chinese again. You’re going to be illiterate if you keep this up.”

  “Illiterate is not the term, and you might be interested to know that Athena is teaching Matthew Greek,” I replied. My remark didn’t have much to do with anything either, but at least it got the subject back to Matthew.

  “It figures,” Laura said. “Nobody even speaks it any more. Wow.”-

  I sat back and took a deep breath. “It’s going to be Matthew’s birthday, and I have to get a present and go north,” I said swiftly. Then I curled into a sort of semifetal defense position and waited for the onslaught.

  “That’s what I mean, only an idiot would live way up there,” Laura shouted, making one of those typically female inferential leaps from nowhere to somewhere in one large bound. “Hell, half the computer complexes are out of order there. I heard you can only dial for food, and then you have to cook it. It isn’t even healthy because of the climate, you can get pneumonia.”

  “Athena likes to rough it,” I said. “Besides, she says it’s good for Matthew. Builds resistance.”

  “Maine is no place to raise a kid,” said Laura. “It’s irresponsible. Hell, you can’t even call the little bastard on the vidphone. I never even talked to your son, ever, not even on the radio. Do you think that’s fair? He doesn’t even come here to visit. How do you think I feel?”

  I was getting edgy. This was a new line with Laura, and I didn’t know how to handle it. “Look, Laura, she’s his mother. I’m lucky she’s nice enough to let me visit him.”

  “Nice enough!” Laura screamed. “She’s a real sweetheart, isn’t she!” Laura stood in front of me, trembling all over, and I forced myself to look into those freakish yellow eyes she has, which look so weird next to her dark skin.

  “Laura, honey,” I said, grasping her hands, “I didn’t marry her because I wanted to marry you, I wish you’d try to remember that. But Matthew’s my only kid. Try to understand.”

  And then Laura had to pull a surprise stunt on me. She fell right into my lap and began to weep. I was astounded. She fell into my arms and started to cry just when I was expecting at least a skull fracture. I was wondering why the hell she couldn’t feed me the right lines. I was struck dumb. Mute and stupid.

  “Damn it, David,” Laura sobbed, “do you think I don’t want to have a kid for you? I’ve been trying six years, and now you have to go up there when I’m ovulating.” I had to admit that there was some justice in what Laura was saying.

  I’d better start over. I keep evading the whole point of all this because I can’t stand thinking about it, and I remember it too goddamn well, and I’m going to have to get it out. It was getting on toward Matthew’s birthday, and he was going to be six years old, and I was running my ass off trying to get ready for the Enomoto birth. Matthew was a funny little kid, and I didn’t know what to get him, so I wandered around the old deserted stores in Miami Beach and finally decided to get him one of those games that teaches you symbolic logic and an old textbook on multidimensional calculus that I was pretty sure Athena hadn’t gotten him yet. On the way home, I began to wonder if that might seem a little stingy, so I scrounged around on the beach and picked up some interesting sea shells for his collection. Laura had rustled up a couple of ancient classics, The House at Pooh Corner, as I recall, and Charlotte’s Web, because she really didn’t understand what kind of kid Matthew was.

  I got away from Laura with a minimal amount of nonsense and told her I’d try to cut the visit short in view of the Enomotos. I set my hovercraft for New York and took off, the computer complex wasn’t working too well to the north of Boston, so I figured I’d guide it manually from there.

  I began thinking about Athena when I got close to New York, partly because that was where I had met her. I had come to the city when I was about eighteen because I was interested in communications, and that’s where one of the biggest old televising complexes is. I figured it might be more interesting than just sitting around the way a lot of people do, and I thought if I learned how to use the equipment, I could do an occasional broadcast when I was in the mood. Besides, it’s more constructive than flying around to parties or talking to friends on the vidphone all day. I was working with an old guy named Raymond De Jong who did a couple of game shows, and when I met Athena, I had been there a year and had already done a couple of telecasts of births and deliveries.

  De Jong sent me to Athena because he thought a decent communications man should have a good background, instead of just being a technician. “When you’re making a commentary on some event,” he had said, “it helps if you can throw in a little historical or philosophical bullshit, just to make it interesting.” Athena was about thirty then and an expert in ancient Greek civilization. Her father had been incredibly proud of being Greek and had taught her the ancient language when she was a kid. Her mother was known all over the world, having had three healthy children. Athena was living in New York with her sister Aphrodite, who was eighteen and acne-scarred, with the worst buck teeth I have ever seen. Old Aphrodite made a play for me a few days after I met them and gave me a nasty cut with those lethal teeth of hers.

  Athena, on the other hand, was a tall wench with red-gold hair and the greatest looking legs you can imagine. She televised lectures on the ancient world to any who were interested, and she lived the part. She was always walking around in those Grecian-style robes she made for herself, and she spent most of her free time prowling around the old 42nd Street Library and the Columbia ruins, poring over old texts. She had never gotten married, which was thought to be a bit subversive because with her heredity, the odds were good that she could have at least a couple of kids, maybe even three or four.

  I might as well admit it. I sat through a hell of a lot of history sessions with Athena with no other motive than to hustle her into the sack. I even put up with Aphrodite just because she was her sister.

  Athena’s a hell of a woman. She was rational, steady, affectionate, and a hell of a good friend to have, but by the time I was screwing her regularly, I had already met Laura, who looks like an African princess and could send my blood pounding in my temples with just one look from those weird yellow eyes.

  And then Athena told me she was pregnant. She already knew I wanted to marry Laura and in that reasonable way of hers told me I’d better announce the marriage right away before she announced the pregnancy. She knew damn well that if I wasn’t already married when she did, half the world was going to be breathing down my neck to marry Athena, and the public pressure just might be too much for me. As it was, there were enough people who thought I should broadcast a divorce. Athena also knew, from what I had told her, that Laura wasn’t the kind of woman who would s
ettle for less than a public commitment. So Laura and I said our vows to each other with De Jong and Athena as witness, and then I sent Laura back to my old place in Miami while I was waiting for my kid to be born.

  As I said, Athena’s a hell of a person. I broadcast the delivery myself, announced my own son’s birth, and there he was, Matthew Contemanopoulos Feinberg, eight pounds, seven ounces, yelling his head off at the whole damn earth.

  He was born without hands.

  That bothered Athena. She was a little sadder and quieter after that, and as soon as she was well enough, she packed up her things and moved up to Maine and stopped broadcasting her lectures. I kept visiting them of course. We made Matthew’s birthday the big event of the year, and we both worried about him together because he was such a strange little guy.

  About a month after the delivery, her brother Plato paid me a friendly little visit and bounced me off the walls.

  I really can’t blame him. Athena deserves more than what she’s got, especially now.

  I keep wandering off, but I’ll try to get back to the point. It was Matthew’s birthday, and I was going to Maine with his presents. Athena lived in a big house not far from the ocean shore, and it was fairly primitive going. No vidphone, a small color TV instead of a Tri-D wall, a small vidtape complex, a kitchen you could only dial groceries from, and then you had to cook them yourself. Even that wasn’t too reliable. You could dial for ground beef and wind up with two pounds of coffee.

  Athena met me at the front door, and she looked even thinner and sadder than I remembered. I thought I’d give her my present right away to cheer her up. It was an old vidtape I’d managed to splice together of a speech by a pre-Plague politician named Spiragnew, who I didn’t know a thing about except that he was Greek, so I thought she’d get a charge out of it. We went inside, and she dialed me a scotch and soda from her bar, and then we sat down and stared at each other for a while.

  She didn’t need to tell me she was worried about Matthew.

  “Uh, well,” I said finally.

  “David, I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He’s been really quiet lately, and depressed, and he doesn’t even talk to me very much anymore. He used to be so interested in his math, and he was getting along marvelously with his Greek, and now he doesn’t even bother with it. He’s so moody, David.”

  “Look, it’s probably just a stage,” I said. I didn’t want to say what I really thought. I wasn’t a very good father, and a boy needs that. Visiting him wasn’t much of a substitute and I knew it.

  “That isn’t all,” Athena said. She got up and dialed a martini for herself and sat down again. “He’s been dialing the computer information bank. For statistics. And records of births. And statistics on population and every other thing that has to do with all of it.”

  I began to feel a little apprehensive at that. “Well, you know Matthew,” I said jovially, trying to grin. “He’s probably plotting one of those graphs of his.”

  “He hasn’t,” Athena said. “And I heard him last night on the radio, practicing his Russian with that friend of his in Leningrad, you know, Yuri. And they were discussing the whole thing.”

  “Look, Athena,” I said, trying to be casual, “I don’t know that he’s doing anything really strange. Everybody’s interested in births. Hell, births are the most popular thing we broadcast.”

  Athena sighed. “That’s not what he’s doing. He found out. That we’re all going to be extinct. The whole race. He and Yuri were saying it. That we’re dying out.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. That’s the kind of thing you don’t think about much, and to say it out loud like that, I just couldn’t believe it.

  “Look, that’s ridiculous,” I said at last. “If Matthew’s going to get morbid about this, it’s not going to do anybody any good. I’ll talk to him, but I don’t want you worrying.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. She got up and went into the kitchen to prepare for Matthew’s birthday party.

  Matthew had been wandering along the coast, and he came in about an hour later and shook hands with me solemnly, using his prosthetic, and then went up to his room. He was still there when Athena called him to supper.

  We always made a big deal about the party. Athena had cooked Matthew his favorite, this Greek veal dish with peppers, and she had dialed a bottle of champagne, which we let Matthew have a small glass! of, and then she brought in the homemade cake with six candles that Matthew dutifully blew out.

  I tried to keep the conversation light. I talked about my preparations for the Enomoto delivery and described just how we were going to bounce the Tri-D signal off one of the old satellites, and how there was a group of visitors coming in from California for the event. Matthew didn’t say much, and he didn’t eat much, and when the meal was over and he had his presents, he went off and began to read one of Laura’s books. Athena looked at me sadly and began to take dishes off the table. I helped her put them into the dispose-all and then went back into the living room.

  Matthew was reading Charlotte’s Web. He looked up as I came into the room.

  “How’s the book?” I asked, not expecting much of a reply. Matthew looked up at me with the gray eyes he had inherited from Athena. That isn’t really accurate. He had inherited the color from Athena, but Athena’s eyes, even when she was tired, always looked inquisitive, or sad, or happy. Matthew’s eyes always looked dead, expressionless.

  “It’s not bad,” he replied. “The author doesn’t try to make nature more palatable to the child, and he doesn’t talk down to him. An adult might gain something from reading it.” Then he put the book down.

  “I suppose,” he went on, in his tired voice, “that Athena told you she’s upset about my behavior.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I told her not to worry. I think I ought to hear your side before I start getting jumpy too.”

  “There really isn’t anything for me to say,” he continued. “I’ve been investigating a problem. Some of the conclusions I reached are upsetting. I’ve been discussing it with Yuri.”

  I was, at this point, beginning to get a bad case of the creeps, and frankly I wasn’t sure why. Matthew had always been funny, and he sounded about the same as he always had.

  I should be a little clearer about this. It became obvious to Athena and myself pretty early in Matthew’s life that he was very bright. He was reading avidly when he was two and was exploring higher mathematics at an age when I had found algebra a pain in the ass. By the time he was five, he was taking his friend Yuri on in games of chess over the radio and beating him regularly, although Yuri was nineteen and supposedly the top chessmaster in the world.

  Athena would worry about him, but I didn’t, at least not so much. I was kind of proud of the little guy. I’d spend so much time bragging about him to Hideo that I’m surprised Hideo wouldn’t run from the room every time I mentioned the kid. I’d tell Athena not to get upset, and she would just look at me and say, “Yes, I know. Matthew’s a genius. Mentally. But he’s still a little boy emotionally, and one of these days I’m afraid he’ll run across something that his mind can handle and his emotions can’t, and, David, I don’t know what it will do to him then.”

  Athena had a point. But as long as Matthew was playing around with math, and we didn’t talk to him about the situation or let him know, I didn’t see much point in getting upset.

  This was different, though, I have to admit, and I sat there in the living room with Matthew and started having one hell of a case of the creeps.

  “Well, just what have you been discussing with Yuri?” I asked, and I must have sounded pretty harsh when I said it because I was trying to control myself.

  He didn’t answer me outright. Instead, he started getting oblique as hell about the whole thing.

  “Do you know where most of the people in the world are living now?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “In this country, along the western coast and the temperate areas of the
eastern coast. In Europe, along the Mediterranean coast. In Russia and China, near the old urban centers. A few in Japan and England.”

  “So what?” I blurted out.

  “Don’t you wonder why?” Matthew asked.

  I thought about it for a few seconds. “Hell, no, I don’t wonder why. Probably because of the climate.”

  “That wouldn’t explain Russia and England,” Matthew said.

  “Probably because that’s where the computer complexes are still working with the most efficiency. What are we playing, Matthew, twenty questions? Look, I’m your father, and I don’t want a lot of folderol. Now just what have you been up to?”

  Matthew looked at me coldly. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, David? I mean just moving and staying where the computers are still operating well.”

  “Hell, no, if you ask me, it makes a lot more sense than moving to where they don’t work.” I was beginning to wonder if Matthew had the brains I had credited him with having.

  Matthew sighed and gave me the same look he would probably have given a cretin. “It doesn’t make more sense than trying to repair the ones that aren’t functioning.”

  “Matthew, I thought you were smart. Nobody knows enough to do that, and besides, there’s plenty of places to live where they do work, so it doesn’t matter. Now, will you get to the point?”

  Athena came into the living room then, turned on the small TV and sat down. “I’m just going to watch the news from Russia, some Ukrainian couple is supposed to have a kid this week, and it’ll be their second, so I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  “I think I’ll go to my room,” Matthew said. I followed him out and up the stairs of the old house to his room.